


The World Is Over

by Tozette



Category: Naruto
Genre: Alternate Universe - Post-Apocalypse, Gen, blanket permission for podfic or translation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-10
Updated: 2015-02-10
Packaged: 2018-03-11 11:54:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 555
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3326417
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tozette/pseuds/Tozette
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tsunade, fed up with an enormous losing streak, makes a bet that “the world won’t end before tomorrow.” </p><p>That night Orochimaru has a teeny, tiny, almost unnoticeable, really, laboratory mishap. It’s a hideous chain reaction: poison seeps through subterranean waterways, gasses shift beneath the earth and… all unexpectedly, a mountain explodes. </p><p>By the end of the week, civilisation is a fond memory.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The World Is Over

**Author's Note:**

> From a series of tumblr AU prompts

_Tsunade, fed up with an enormous losing streak, makes a bet that “the world won’t end before tomorrow.”_

_That night Orochimaru has a teeny, tiny, almost unnoticeable, really, laboratory mishap. It’s a hideous chain reaction: poison seeps through subterranean waterways, gasses shift beneath the earth and… all unexpectedly, a mountain explodes._

_By the end of the week, civilisation is a fond memory._

* * *

“So now the poison’s on fire,” Kabuto informs his boss, shifting nervously from foot to foot. 

"Mm."

He doesn’t sound very interested, so Kabuto elaborates. “Actually, the whole country is… kind of on fire.”

"…Ah."

There is a long pause. “Orochimaru-sama, I would suggest—” Kabuto is about to say that ‘an evacuation is in order because we don’t all want to die horribly,’ but Orochimaru is already long gone.

* * *

_The ash blocks out the sun, and poison spreads on the air currents. Millions die. Unfortunately, it doesn’t kill everybody._

_What it does to the survivors is… change them._

* * *

“I never thought of diluting it with six thousand kilometers and an enormous volcanic eruption,” Orochimaru mutters, six months later, dirty and cold and hiding below ground in a cave blocked off by a lake. “I wonder —”

  
Sakura leans over and smacks him over the head. Somebody has to do it. Tsunade, after all, fell in the first wave of mutations. Sakura is grim-faced and mean-mouthed and more than willing to carry on her legacy.

  
"Go to sleep already,” she spits at him, and he cuts his strange eyes toward her. She sees there the same anxiety that lives in her - a neurotic, paranoid thing that seethes under her skin day and night. The only ninja left are survivors, people who will crawl and sneak and retreat from every fight just to live to see one more dawn. 

  
Little wonder about her brave friends, then. Little wonder about Lee and Gai-sensei, about Kiba and Ino. Little wonder about Anko and Genma and —  
There’s no need to rehash this. Enough. 

It is what it is. 

It’s just unfair, she thinks. That her friends should die, that her heroes should die, and yet —

Sakura stares at her new companion - maybe her last companion - and doesn’t flinch. She also doesn’t punch him through a wall, though god knows she wants to.

* * *

_The mutations are varied and terrible, almost impossible to kill. Each one is filled with nature chakra, drawing all their power from the earth until it warps their human forms. Each is a mix of the elements, and they regenerate at a fearsome rate._

_Loyal ninja, rogues, legends - all ninja fall before the mindless, vicious armies._

* * *

They run into Itachi and Kakuzu thirty miles out from what was once Amegakure, and is now a smoking crater.

"Akatsuki doesn’t pay me enough to die for them," Kakuzu says, flat and annoyed, but his eyes are drifting between Orochimaru and Sakura, calculating.

Itachi is quiet so it’s hard to tell, but his face is pallid and his eyes are blank with some all-consuming apathy. For the first week he sleeps little - less than the rest of them, even - and spends any free time staring at nothing, silent.

Sakura figures, without much sympathy, that he must have heard about Sasuke.

"We killed him," she tells him once, and only once. "Naruto died doing it."

"Aa." Itachi doesn’t look at her.


End file.
